Groovy

I have been using Groovy for almost 2 years now, and it has been a great experience.

I have a preference for typed languages, but there is no doubt that scripting languages have enormous utility too. Groovy is very flexible in this aspect. You can program using types - in this case Groovy is just Java with some nice syntax sugar - or you can program without types - in this case Groovy is a scripting language with an incredible set of libraries: anything that runs on the Java Virtual Machine.

I read that the Groovy team is considering adding more features to allow better performance in the type-based programs. This is expected for the 2.0 release.

Even Java is becoming easier to use with the Project Coin language changes.
By the way, Groovy 1.9 will include JDK 7 support including project coin language changes and invokeDynamic to improve performance.